"Voyages II" by Hart Crane

Topics discussed in this episode include:

-Encountering the phantom of Crane

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-The lamentable pedigree of the poete maudit

-Life Savers! 

-Why isn't there a movie yet about Harry Crosby? 

-Nothing says Guggenheim fellowship like some tropical adultery

-Neo-Romantics revisited 

-The "Logic of Metaphor" and Logonautics

-Poets as caretakers of language

-Cubic symmetry! 

-Rhymed vs. Blank verse

-The mighty Marlovian line

-The ocean: best wingwoman ever

-Romeo and Juliet's hidden sonnet

-John Donne's incredibly raunchy To His Mistress Going To Bed

-Walt Whitman's Song of Myself 21

-My seal of approval

-As it is written, so will it be done

Text of poem:

Voyages II

—And yet this great wink of eternity,

Of rimless floods, unfettered leewardings,   

Samite sheeted and processioned where   

Her undinal vast belly moonward bends,   

Laughing the wrapt inflections of our love;

Take this Sea, whose diapason knells   

On scrolls of silver snowy sentences,

The sceptred terror of whose sessions rends   

As her demeanors motion well or ill,   

All but the pieties of lovers’ hands.

And onward, as bells off San Salvador   

Salute the crocus lustres of the stars,

In these poinsettia meadows of her tides,—

Adagios of islands, O my Prodigal,

Complete the dark confessions her veins spell.

Mark how her turning shoulders wind the hours,   

And hasten while her penniless rich palms   

Pass superscription of bent foam and wave,—

Hasten, while they are true,—sleep, death, desire,   

Close round one instant in one floating flower.

Bind us in time, O Seasons clear, and awe.   

O minstrel galleons of Carib fire,

Bequeath us to no earthly shore until

Is answered in the vortex of our grave

The seal’s wide spindrift gaze toward paradise.